Thus, although the Roman state continued and Roman state traditions were maintained, modern historians distinguish Byzantium from ancient Rome insofar as it was centered on Constantinople, oriented towards Greek rather than Latin culture, and characterized by Orthodox Christianity. Just as the Byzantine Empire represented the political continuation of the Roman Empire, Byzantine art and culture developed directly out of the art of the Roman Empire, which was itself profoundly influenced by ancient Greek art.
Byzantine art never lost sight of this classical heritage. For example, the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, was adorned with a large number of classical sculptures, although they eventually became an object of some puzzlement for its inhabitants.
And indeed, the art produced during the Byzantine Empire, although marked by periodic revivals of a classical aesthetic, was above all marked by the development of a new aesthetic. Thus, although the Byzantine Empire had a multi-ethnic character during most of its history, and preserved Romano-Hellenistic traditions, it became identified by its western and northern contemporaries with its increasingly predominant Greek element and its own unique cultural developments.
This is the oldest surviving map of the city and the only one that predates the Turkish conquest of the city in CE. This older name of the city would rarely be used from this point onward except in historical or poetic contexts. These are all based on medieval stereotypes about the Byzantine Empire that developed as western Europeans came into contact with the Byzantines, and were perplexed by their more structured government.
Once ignited, it could not be extinguished with water and could even burn on the surface of the sea. Greek Fire was most famously associated with the Byzantine navy, who used it to devastating effect against Arab and Russian invaders during sieges of Constantinople in the seventh, eighth and tenth centuries.
Byzantium was almost always a Christian empire, but over the centuries its Greek-speaking church developed distinct liturgical differences from the Catholic, Latin-speaking church in the West. The theological tensions finally boiled over in , when a falling out between the patriarch of Constantinople and a papal delegate led the Eastern and Western churches to issue decrees excommunicating one another.
The two churches eventually repealed their excommunication orders in the s following a historic meeting between the Catholic Pope Paul VI and the Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras I, but they remain separate entities to this day. One of the darkest chapters in Byzantine history began in the early 13th century, when Christian warriors assembled in Venice for the Fourth Crusade. The Crusaders were supposed to sail for the Middle East to seize Jerusalem from the Muslim Turks, but due to cash shortages and friction with the Orthodox Byzantines, they were persuaded to make a detour to Constantinople to restore a deposed Emperor to the throne.
After a deal to fund their expedition to the Holy Lands fell through in , the Crusaders carried out a bloody sack of Constantinople, burning the city and carting off much of its treasure, art and religious relics. They also carved up much of the declining Byzantine Empire and installed a Latin ruler. While the Byzantines later recaptured Constantinople in , the Empire would never regain its former glory. In the spring of , having already conquered most of the Byzantine frontier, Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmed II laid siege to the capital with a collection of cannons specially designed by a Hungarian engineer.
At the center of the arsenal was a foot gun so heavy that a team of 60 oxen was required to transport it. With the fall of its once-mighty capital, the Byzantine Empire crumbled after more than 1, years in existence. The writings of Greek thinkers such as Plato, Ptolemy and Galen might have been lost to history if not for the Byzantine Empire. Only three can be noted: a Tzetzes identification of a certain Servlias with the ancient Roman family of Servilii; [4] b Nikephoros Bryennios identification of the Doukai with the clan of Constantine the Great that had come to Constantinople from the Elder Rome; [5] and c Nikephoros Basilakes connection of the ancestry of the nomophylax Alexios Aristenos with Aineas.
When moving to the third level of analysis, i. He structures the material of his chronicle in a manner different from his predecessors. A usual Byzantine chronicle started with the Creation and Jewish history, continued with a history of the Eastern Empires till Alexander the Great and then passed to Roman history.
Zonaras devotes a far larger part to pre-Constantine history about half of his entire work and of that part, Roman history comprises about two thirds. He actually includes a large section on Republican Rome, whereas earlier chronographers passed directly to Caesar after the expulsion of the kingship. But Zonaras is a rather exceptional case, self-exiled for years in a monastery on an island, and rather conservative and negative towards the Komnenian regime and its basic values.
He does not miss an opportunity to comment occasionally on what he considers as a tyrannical rule. So, it appears that the Byzantines did not feel themselves so close to their supposed Latin past.
When we look at Kinnamos' views, one of the main exponents of Manuel's international policy, we will be able to understand what had happened. In one of his digressions about the usurpation of the title of basileus by the German emperor Conrad, Kinnamos actively defends the Roman heritage of the Byzantines. He laments the fact that Westerners consider Constantinople's rule different from that of Rome. But, actually he has no answer to give to that claim, leaving it virtually unanswered.
What he does though, is to question the Western claim itself. He declares that the imperial rule was lost in Rome after Romulus Augustulus, and that the rule of Rome fell thereafter into barbarian hands.
The Byzantines could think only in terms of imperial rule in accordance with Daniel's Succession of Kingdom. This theory, that we saw in Kinnamos, distinguishes the two Romes, and is repeated in the writings of other Byzantines. It could be used as an argument against the primacy of the see of Rome against Constantinople. Michael Glykas goes even further. Commenting on the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in by the Ostrogoth Odoacer, he writes: 'It is exactly then that the imperial rule of the Romans ended.
Furthermore, Manasses, using comments similar to Glykas, writes: 'So Rome having the imperial rule for a little longer, she was deprived of it, and she fell to barbarian kings and rulers of ethne , on whose hands she was humiliated Having had Romulus in the start as a legitimate emperor, she lost the imperial rule again with a Romulus, and then she was not governed by emperors anymore, as she had fallen and trampled on by barbarians.
And these happened to the Elder Rome, but our own is flourishing, growing, standing'. This is the only lament in the 12th century for the fall of Elder Rome, but note Manasses' contrast with and the shift to the praise of New Rome.
Moreover, whereas the term Romans, as we have already explained, is mostly used for the Byzantines, in two sources of the 12th century in John Tzetzes and in the satiric dialogue Timarion we encounter a different use: the term Romans is instead used exclusively for the ancient Romans.
Soon, Niketas Choniates would follow the same line by calling the Crusaders that had just occupied Constantinople 'Aineiades', drawing additionally a comparison with the fall of Troy; it was then that the Aineiades finally took revenge for the fall of Troy.
Romanitas however still mattered for much, even though it had no Latin nuance anymore. For Byzantines, romanitas signified their ancestry, their state tradition, which was nothing else than that very significant fact of the transfer of the capital of the Roman Empire to Byzantion by the emperor Constantine the Great. But the Byzantines did not understand this as a transfer of the capital; they conceived it as the transfer of the imperial rule, of basileia , to their city, to their land, thus actually creating a new state.
First and foremost, they considered themselves as descendants of Constantine the Great and not of Alexander the Great, David or Augustus.
The void left by the ancient Roman heritage was soon filled by the emergence of Hellenism, in the 12th century. But this Hellenism was still understood mostly as a cultural and rhetorical notion. The claims of Christianity and of the Roman heritage, it appears, were not enough to differentiate the two peoples and to raise the Byzantines effectively above the Latins.
The Hellenic claim stood as the barrier dividing the Byzantines from the 'barbarians'. The deconstruction of the Latin past and the emergence of Hellenism, two parallel developments, laid the basis for the emergence of a national Hellenism in the 13th century. Leib ed.
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